Gender, Culture and Fertility

So many things to write about, so much to do. I describe myself as a nomad. The life of Nomad is one that is home everywhere. Many things are happening in life, and some synchronicity is leading to insights about myself as a woman. The role of women in Indian society is all crap, as we know it. Each person has their own fantasy of what society “allows” without halting to reflect that it is them that collectively create society. Anyway, all that is irrelevant to my current ponderings.

I read Germaine Greer’s book – Sex and Destiny, where she talks about the role of our sexuality in out life and the impact of the world on us based on our gender. The book is an awesome read as well as a life changing line of exploration, but what is currently on my mind is the chapter she wrote on “a child is born”. She describes a “western culture” which admittedly is unfamiliar to me, yet some observations strike a chord. I have started seeing this whole business of contraception and family planning as a wholesale cultural hatred and negation of a woman’s fertility. Identifying goals as a working woman in a relationship with a man has taken a whole new meaning. No? Think about this:

Pregnancy is a normal state of being for a woman – yes/no? If it is normal, why doesn’t anyone trust a pregnant woman to know what’s best for her?

We see having more than the “prescribed number of children” as a socially embarrassing thing and consider an excess of children to be a drain on personal and national resources. Never mind if a rich man can afford a hundred kids, or a poor man can’t afford one. No one thinks that a rich man having plenty of kids will eventually lead to an increase in the population of rich people, or the division of the wealth between them will lead to decreasing differences between the rich and poor. Thinking is superfluous – the statistic is the allowed fertility.

A woman’s fertility is unacceptable and needs to be allowed only in the form of “planned pregnancies” where the focus is not so much on her being a fertile woman as it is on planning ovulation, contraception and then living by the word of some expert (earlier it was midwives, which graduated to doctors, and now its, gynaecologists, sonography techinicians, etc) who knows better what she should do with this alien state of her body till it is rid of its alienness through birth of the child.

Contraception is a way of removing the consequences of intimacy and reducing the requirement for commitment. Yet, how many females want to remove the requirement for committment? How many males are willing to take responsibility for their intimacies? I don’t know, but my hunch is that by solving the symptom on the physical manifestation level, we have left an entire culture vulnerable to emotional consequences.

As I sit here staring at my screen, I am wondering what impact these insights will have on my life. Will it mean a more meaningful intimacy with my husband, where awareness of the implications of the intimacy between us as man and woman open up an entire world of beauty? Or will it be a hesitation to rock the boat, where we continue to see fertility as a thing to be “controlled”. Can we acknowledge that as a woman and man, our fertility is a part of it?

Oh! I hadn’t read this comment by you Gauri! How strange, and how wonderful to discover it after all this time. Indeed, the force to turn into a breeding cow for a glorious heir is also another manifestation of control of fertility.

Fertility is integral to our being, true. Unfortunately, I am discovering that the more something is integral, the more we try to ‘sanitize’ it and keep it under control, so that it never leaves us vulnerable. Sadly, it doesn’t allow us to experience either.

Interesting Perspective. However, I feel that every social norm has two, in fact more than two, multiple sides to it. What you see as a collective hatred / denial of human fertility looks different when we see the women being forced into pregnancy after pregancy for a nale child. Any form of education – mass or individual – has many dimensions. The original concepts that have gone into ceratin social reforms get derailed on the way and we are left with extremism.

I am newly aware from your reflections that there are people who may accept or deny fertility as a part of self. Somehow I never thought that one would deny something so integral to our being! 🙂